Puducherry: After the results of the MBBS entrance exam at Jipmer were published recently, the medical college is being accused of alleged misconduct during the exam. The allegations has been put by All India NR Congress MLA Ashok Anand complaining about alleged irregularities in the conduct of the exam in two shifts.

Jipmer had held its entrance exam in two batches earlier on June 5. Anand has implied that the morning batch exam was alleged to be tough, followed by the afternoon test which was easy to score. Jipmer has only recently declared the merit list.

Anand is not alone in his endeavour to demand attention on the entrance examination process. Some fora is also demanding that Jipmer should immediately halt the admissions. They also allege that the earlier tests conducted were not above the board. They demand organising new tests for MBBS admissions now.

Addressing the media, Jipmer dean (academic) Dr. S Mahadevan said the institute was left with no option than holding online examinations in two shifts at 270 centres across 75 cities as a record number of 1,55,193 candidates had applied for the course. Till last year, the institute used to conduct entrance examinations in one shift.

“The concept (of two shifts) is not new. All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) conducts entrance examinations in two shifts. Our vendor (entrusted with the task of holding online computer-based examinations) expressed their inability to hold the examinations in one shift if the number of applicants exceeded more than 1.5 lakh. Hence, we decided to hold examinations in two shifts. The merit list was released after normalization procedure based on percentile score,” said Mahadevan in the presence of Jipmer director S C Parija.

In addition he implied that there is no strong premise to the argument that the morning question paper was tougher than the afternoon shift paper. 30 Puducherry candidates under the unreserved category have got selection, out of which 16 appeared in the morning shift and rest of 14 in the afternoon batch.